Items tagged with 40nm

Last week, we paid a visit to ARM's headquarters in Cambridge, England and sat down with the company for multiple deep dives into its structure, processor architecture, and the future of its product design. The semiconductor market for mobile and hand-held devices has changed dramatically in the past six years and ARM has had to evolve alongside it. This is the first in a series of articles designed to profile different aspects of the company and its competition with Intel... ARMs Race: Licensing vs. Manufacturing In Mobile...Read more...

Last week, we paid a visit to ARM's headquarters in Cambridge, England and sat down with the company for multiple deep dives into its structure, processor architecture, and the future of its product design. The semiconductor market for mobile and hand-held devices has changed dramatically in the past six years and ARM has had to evolve along side it. This is the first in a series of articles designed to profile different aspects of the company and its competition with Intel. ARM's Licensing and Design Model Most readers are aware that ARM has a very different business model than Intel. Specifically,...Read more...

AMD's upcoming Kabini SoC sits at the heart of the PlayStation 4, the next-generation Xbox 720 (unofficially), and is central to the company's tablet and laptop plans for 2013. It's also a key component of Sunnyvale's new embedded strategy, which is part of what makes the new crop of embedded products AMD announced today rather interesting. The new SoCs run the gamut from 9W - 25W and the majority are quad core. The new embedded chips are as follows: GX-420CA (quad-core, 2.0GHz, Radeon 8400E @ 600MHz, 25W TDP) GX-415GA (quad-core, 1.5GHz, Radeon 8330E @ 500MHz, 15W TDP) GX-217GA (dual-core, 1.65GHz,...Read more...

AMD is launching its first tablet-optimized APU today, in a bid to challenge Intel's de facto dominance of the Windows 8 tablet market. Dubbed Hondo, the new Z-60 draws less power than any Brazos-based part AMD has launched before. Some of you may remember that AMD launched a tablet processor last year, but the Z-01 -- codenamed Desna -- was an ordinary Brazos core that binned well enough to run within a lower power envelope. It was more a proof-of-concept chip, meant to demonstrate that AMD could, and would, compete in the tablet market. Hondo, in contrast, is a new spin on the original Brazos...Read more...

Inside sources have leaked information to the press claiming that the CPU in the next-generation PS4 (codenamed Orbis) is an AMD Llano A8-3850. The chip will supposedly be paired with an AMD Radeon 7670 GPU with 1GB of integrated VRAM. With all due respect to IGN, this is the sort of report that deserves a considerably better review than they apparently gave it. Sony may well be working with that level of AMD hardware, but that's not the same as shipping said configurations. Let's start with the APU. The A8-3850 was one of AMD's earliest Llano chips; a 100W 2.9GHz quad-core with an integrated Radeon...Read more...

NAND Flash and SSDs have become the darling of enthusiasts in recent years, thanks to a potent combination of improved read/write performance, virtually no latency, and lower power consumption compared to hard drives. A new report from the University of California San Diego, however, casts doubt on the long-term scalability of the format. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS)' most recent report backs up such statements. Flash's fundamental problem is that the same technological innovations that are improving performance, power consumption, and cutting costs are also biting...Read more...

GlobalFoundries and Samsung announced today that they intend to synchronize their 28nm high-performance/low-leakage production facilities. This new agreement follows a 2010 collaboration between GloFo, Samsung, IBM, and STMicroelectronics in which all four firms agreed to cooperate in building out their low-power 28nm process nodes. One of the differences between modern foundries and Intel (or, historically, AMD) is that foundries typically offer the same process in a variety of flavors. GlobalFoundries, like TSMC, offers 40nm production in both a generic (G) and a low-power (LP) version, with...Read more...

The tendency of DRAM to become cheaper over time is generally considered a good thing—at least, in the consumer market—but evidence suggests prices may have fallen a bit too much. Current manufacturing costs using 40nm technology is about US $1.50 while the selling price for a 2Gb part is currently $1.17 - $1.31. This is less a problem for the top-tier RAM manufacturers who are using 30nm tech, but there's no way for smaller players to quickly migrate to the updated process. Selling parts below the cost of manufacture is obviously unsustainable over the long term, a fact that has left...Read more...

Oops. Yesterday we published a story (since taken down) noting that AMD had apparently flip-flopped on its 28nm plans and would use TSMC for 28nm production in the 2012 timeframe rather than going with GlobalFoundries. The original piece we discussed ran Cens.com, which bills itself as "Taiwan's Economic News." We're not going to link it again, but the piece is still live if you care to read it. We heard from both AMD and GlobalFoundries a few hours after we published our original story; both companies categorically deny that there's been a change of plans with regard to AMD's contract with TSMC....Read more...

TSMC officially began building its next-generation Fab 15 foundry on Friday. The facility, or 'gigafab' in TSMC parlance, will begin coming online in 2012, long-term capacity is said to be upwards of 100,000 wafer starts a month. In contrast, GlobalFoundries New York facility currently under construction is targeting 60,000 wafer starts / month once in full production. According to TSMC, the new fab has a price tag of some $9.4 billion and will come online with both 40nm and 28nm production nodes. We're guessing TSMC's goal here is to further extend its glowing record as a leading edge node provider—after...Read more...

For better or worse, the launch of NVIDIA's next-generation GPU architecture codenamed Fermi, a.k.a. GF100, is one of the most highly anticipated in our industry, ever. Information about the GPU has been tricking out for many months now, some of it good and some bad. Regardless of what you have chosen to believe or ignore up to this point, one irrefutable fact remains. NVIDIA is extremely late to the DirectX-11 party. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Rival AMD has used the last few months to release a myriad of DX11-class cards ranging in price from under $100 to almost $700, fleshing...Read more...

For better or worse, the launch of NVIDIA's next-generation GPU architecture codenamed Fermi, a.k.a. GF100, is one of the most highly anticipated in our industry, ever. Information about the GPU has been tricking out for many months now, some of it good and some bad. Regardless of what you have chosen to believe or ignore up to this point, one irrefutable fact remains. NVIDIA is extremely late to the DirectX-11 party. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Rival AMD has used the last few months to release a myriad of DX11-class cards ranging in price from under $100 to almost $700, fleshing...Read more...

When AMD renegotiated its x86 licensing deal with Intel last year, one of the most significant long-term changes was a marked reduction in how much of GlobalFoundries AMD had to own in order to remain within the terms of its manufacturing license. As a result of this change, AMD announced last month that it intended to significantly accelerate the financial split between itself and GlobalFoundries; we may now be starting to see the impact of that transition on the GlobalFoundries' side of the business. Today, GF announced a new strategic partnership with ARM, in which the two companies will collaborate...Read more...

We don't normally cover TSMC directly, but the firm's 40nm troubles had a material impact on both AMD and NVIDIA in the past few quarters, so we thought we'd take a peek at the company's financials. The company's quarterly results were excellent; net income rose 162.5 percent compared to a year ago, while revenue was up 42.6 percent. Broken down by industry segment, sales in communications and consumer segments fell eight and 15 percent, but computer-related sales grew by 22 percent. A wafer of 40nm ATI Radeons. Now if only they could make more of them...Despite the firm's well-publicized issues,...Read more...